Abducted Ukrainian journalist found killed, believed to be tortured first

A kidnapped Ukrainian journalist and Maidan activist has been found dead in a forest some 150 kilometers (90 miles) from the capital Kiev. The reporter is believed to have been brutally tortured before being killed and buried, local media report.

According to the local prosecutor’s office, Vasily Sergiyenko was
beaten and abducted in his home city of Korsun-Shevchenkivsky,
central Ukraine, on Friday evening.

“It has been established that at around 20:30 on April 4
perpetrators kidnapped Vasily Sergiyenko. Later he was killed and
his body was buried in a forest in an attempt to hide the
evidence,” Cherkassk province’s prosecutors announced in a
statement on Sunday.

The nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party, of which Sergiyenko was
a member, said that according to witnesses a group of three
unknown men attacked the local newspaper reporter outside his
home on Friday evening. There was a fight, and Sergiyenko was
forced into a white car.

This version was corroborated by the journalist’s mother who
called the police right after her son was attacked and abducted.

Sergiyenko’s body with stab wounds and signs of beatings to his
head and knees was discovered on Saturday afternoon, when a group
of self-defense unit members found a freshly heaped up mound
disguised as a dump.

“In the afternoon guys from local self-defense forces found a
spot of freshly dug pit. They waited until police came and
started digging out the rubbish-covered spot. They found a man’s
body lying with his face down with hand-cuffs on his
wrists,” the local Gazeta.ua online newspaper cited Oleg
Sobchenko as saying. “After they lifted the man’s body we saw
the signs of terrible torture: Vasiliy’s head was completely
smashed, his knees fractured, [he had] several knife wounds in
the area of his kidneys, a knife wound in the heart area and
several knife wounds to his heart from his back, his neck was
also cut.”

Svoboda Party believes the killing bears the hallmarks of a
politically motivated hit. Vasily Sergiyenko played an active
role during Maidan protests in February, which resulted in the
ouster of President Viktor Yanukovich and the incumbent
government.

At the same time, the prosecution isn’t ruling out that
Sergiyenko’s death could be somehow connected with the former
head of the Cherkassk region, Sergey Tulube. The murdered
journalist wrote a number of critical pieces about Tulube, who is
now wanted by police.

This is the second case of a journalist being murdered in the
past few months of political crisis in Ukraine. In mid-February
the journalist, Vyacheslav Veremyi, of the local “Vremya”
(“Time”) pro-government newspaper died of a gunshot to the chest. The reporter
and his colleague, an IT specialist, were attacked by unknown
people about 800 meters away from Independence Square (Maidan),
while going home by taxi. The two were beaten up and shot. The
journalist sustained deadly injuries, while his colleague’s face
was seriously maimed.